Pornographer Larry Flynt steps up bid to stop his shooter's execution

Larry Flynt wants to stop the US state of Missouri executing the man whose bullet put the publisher of Hustler magazine in a wheelchair for life.

Over the weekend, Flynt and the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit to force the state to release documents on how the state determines the process by which it kills prisoners.

Joseph Paul Franklin, 63, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on November 20.

Like many US states, Missouri has had a complicated relationship with the death penalty, which was effectively suspended by the US Supreme Court on constitutional grounds in 1972 but reinstated in 1976. Legal attacks on the death penalty have continued ever since and the current wave includes questions about the drugs used in the execution and whether they really stop unusual pain and suffering.

Missouri has said it will revise the ingredients of its death cocktail in time to execute Franklin. It had halted lethal injections in 2006 after questions about how a doctor on the death team administered the lethal injection.

Franklin, who told the St Louis Post-Dispatch in 1995 that he had changed his name to honour Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, has been convicted of eight racially motivated murders in several states. In Missouri, he was convicted of using a hunting rifle to kill a man outside a St Louis synagogue in 1977. He has told authorities that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party.